IT WAS A MONDAY and I was on the elliptical, bouncing up and down, getting my sweat on, and hearing the latest romantic dish from my doctor friend. This is our semi-weekly tradition: one hour of scheduled gym time to detox and swap stories. She was recounting one of those epic second dates. It was one where you are just getting to know someone, and suddenly without trying, you are indescribably happy and entranced by the beauty of the world. I love hearing those stories, and I was listening intently to her happiness when suddenly she became very direct. “I know to the outside world I seem like I’ve got all the answers, and I can say to myself, ‘Why wouldn’t he want me?’” she said. “But the thing is, I really like him and so there is a part of me that thinks, ‘What makes me so special that he would forsake all others and pick me?’” My immediate response: “You’re a smart, funny, bombshell with a doctorate and absurdly straight teeth.” “I know, but you know me” she responded. “When I really like someone, I get all giddy and nervous.” Her statement made me chuckle because in love, or at least when we see the potential for love, being giddy and nervous is how we all seem to be. We’re excited at the prospect of what is to come because when you’re out there dating, there are so many more misses than hits. And we are nervous because, as we show our true selves, we worry the people we really like might see underneath our charming exteriors and decide they don’t like what they see. My friend knows logically what causes her giddy nervousness, but she needed to be reminded of that and, more importantly, she needed to be reminded of her awesomeness.

“I’m going to appeal to the scientist in you. Right now, you are starting what you hope will be a very successful experiment. But, like the beginning of any experiment, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” I responded. “You have a hypothesis that this will be great. You are in the process of setting up your experiment, and then you collect the data. If this is meant to continue beyond infatuation the data you will see and feel is that he makes you feel like the smart, beautiful, and funny person that you are. Just give it time.” She smiled and thanked me for the pep talk, but I got to thinking of love and, more specifically, dating as experiments in which we are all scientists; sometimes our methodology—the way that we approach someone or a situation—is all wrong for the given person. Sometimes we are far too eager and try to rush things and end up messing it all up. And sometimes, our best experiments don’t work out.

What we have to remind ourselves is that in the experiment of dating, sometimes a negative outcome is inevitable. The fear of that outcome shouldn’t stop us from experimenting, and it shouldn’t drive us to force things to get an immediate answer about where the relationship is going. Both of these actions are sure-fire ways to wreck our experiments

And even once the evidence starts to build that the relationship is going well, unlike the experiments we run in our labs, experimenting with love and dating, is never over. Living with the hopeful anticipation of an uncertain future is par for the course.

So, take heart and have courage if you are just starting to see someone. Consult with lab mates (aka friends) that you trust and who know something about these experiments. And remember, it is better to have lost your eyebrows in a freak Bunsen burner explosion then to have someone tell you that you need to tweeze your eyebrows…wait, that didn’t make sense. Scratch that. Bottom line, get out there and experiment, you love scientist!

Bottom line, get out there and experiment, you love scientist!

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Author

| Bowen Marshall

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. –Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

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About Mosaic

In life, there are no second chances and no do-overs. Each of us has a past that has inscribed upon us certain joys, sorrows, and beliefs that we hold about the world. We cannot change our pasts. We cannot change the pieces of life that have marked us. But we can change our mental and emotional relationships to what has happened to us. The question that is at the heart of this column is, “How do we do this?” How do we accept that every moment of every day presents an opportunity for us to rise, to change how we interact with the world so that our pasts do not determine our futures, and in the process change the world around us? I write this column as one forum to figure this out. And I do it because I believe that our internal struggles with questions of identity, of self, and of the beliefs we hold about the world are intrinsically tied to the larger movement of equality for which we as an LGBTQ community are questing. If we truly came to realize how powerful we are in every moment, who knows the journeys we would travel or the dreams we would achieve.